At INFODAD, we rank everything we review with plus signs, on a scale from one (+) [disappointing] to four (++++) [definitely worth considering]. We mostly review (+++) or better items. Very rarely, we give an exceptional item a fifth plus. We are independent reviewers and, as parents, want to help families learn which books, music, and computer-related items we and our children love...or hate. INFODAD is a service of TransCentury Communications, Inc., Fort Myers, Florida, infodad@gmail.com.

May 12, 2016

(+++) AMERICA, PSYCHED OUT

Fans of the Grateful Dead
will be delighted to learn that they are the most important cultural influence
the United States has had in the last half century. At least that is the
impression that Jesse Jarnow offers in Heads,
an exhaustively researched and often entertaining look at America as
Psychedelic Central that starts from the premise that the members of the
Grateful Dead – and the band’s followers – were and still are at the epicenter
of pretty much everything societally interesting. “The Dead’s music makes a
particularly good soundtrack for long highway miles as groupminds get together
and keep the cosmic fire aflicker and the joints lit, because there’s something
coming. There’s always something coming.” That pretty much encapsulates
Jarnow’s thesis as well as his style, the latter being so determinedly with-it
that it sometimes hovers on the edge of self-parody: “The biggest city in
psychedelic America is a portable bopping skyline on the horizon. The little
municipality moves from town to town, bringing drugs and access points to
numerous alternative social networks.”

Jarnow takes the Dead very
seriously, and he truly believes their impact is omnipresent, even attributing
today’s use of emoji to Dead influence and what Jarnow deems to be the victory
of the psychedelic revolution. That this is over the top goes without saying –
well, not really, since Jarnow says it, but it is often as entertaining as it
is overdone. Jarnow does a really fine job as a pop historian of figures both
well-known (Ken Kesey) and known well only in limited areas (Owsley Stanley
[“Bear”], 1935-2011, Bay Area audio engineer and central mover of the San
Francisco hippie movement in the 1960s). Heads
sprawls by design and sometimes, it seems, of its own volition, as Jarnow
probes the interrelationship of psychedelic drugs and
Grateful Dead music with American culture as a whole and the birth of the
Internet in particular. The book’s very casual voice belies the clearly careful
research that Jarnow has done, including a genuinely impressive number of
interviews with key figures in the psychedelic movement in general and the
Dead’s milieu specifically. Jarnow in fact comes across as so committed a
Deadhead that anyone not within that particular purview is likely to be confused
or put off from time to time – actually a lot of the time, since the book is
crammed with insider language, references clear only to those already in the
know, and a general sense of hipster cool that you either share before reading
or will find it impossible to acquire within these 468 pages.

The
fact is that a lot of Heads reads
like a stoner memoir, with Jarnow writing as if he has been up all night while
sampling a variety of the substances he is writing about – and whether this is
true or merely his authorial persona is beside the point. The style is the substance here, to a great
degree, even if Jarnow seems never to have heard of Marshall McLuhan (he never
mentions him, in any case). Thus, the frequently revelatory cultural analysis
is available only to readers who are willing and able to accept Jarnow’s
meandering, discursive, tangent-filled narrative at face value and, um, “go
with the flow.” There is so much of the Dead here that Jarnow’s forays into
discussing intriguing and less-known elements of psychedelia-spawned culture
get short shrift. It would have been nice, for example, to know more about New
York’s street-art-focused Parkies and the use of psychedelics by many of the
founders of what is now the technology-permeated Silicon Valley. The fact that
Jarnow brings up these elements of the psychedelic subculture (or culture) at
all is a strength of the book; the fact that he passes over them rather
lightly, while dwelling at such great length on all things Deadhead, is a
weakness.

It is absolutely necessary to accept and
revel in Jarnow’s trivia-and-reference-packed style in order to get the most
from Heads. “Spinning is their
meditation. The lyrics of Robert Hunter, as passed through the soul of Garcia,
are their texts. But even more fundamental is Garcia’s guitar playing, his
note-clusters direct translations of the Logos, as valuable and real as what
Terrence McKenna speaks of when describing his DMT experiences. It’s Jerry, the
Spinners know.” To those for whom this sort of writing is immediately
comprehensible and even profound, Heads
will be revelatory and immensely involving. To those for whom it is abstruse,
self-indulgent and preoccupied with minutiae, Heads will come across as much ado about – well, not “nothing,”
because there is really a great deal of information here, a lot of it
fascinating, but much ado about much less than Jarnow strives so mightily to
deem deeply significant.